In just 50 years, we could cure our addiction to oil

By David L. Chandler

IT HAS been a bad year for oil. Consumers rather than suppliers that is, who have been forced to pay ever higher prices for their black gold. With most of the industrialised world, and particularly the US, dependent on oil for its energy, reliance on this diminishing resource never seemed more precarious.

Yet the perception that the world cannot do without oil is misguided. True, many of the alternatives, such as wind power, biofuels or a hydrogen economy, appear too impractical or distant to allow an immediate divorce from oil. But a raft of studies, researched and funded not just by advocates of alternative energy but also those with vested interests in the status quo, suggest otherwise.

The potential pay-offs are huge. No more massive subsidies for oil exploration and extraction. No more reliance on troubled regions such as the Middle East, which has 65 per cent of the world’s oil reserves. Huge cuts in pollution and a curtailing of climate change. In short, the strategy is a no-brainer. The only losers would be the oil business – one of the world’s richest and most powerful industries.

That industry, of course, nurtured President Bush, whose administration’s policies are widely seen to favour fossil fuels. One key provision of the Bush administration’s Energy Bill, a legislative priority over the past three years, would have allowed drilling in an Alaskan wildlife reserve. But critics say the potential impact on the region’s fragile ecosystem would be disproportionate to any benefits to the nation’s oil supply, and the provision has so far been blocked by most Democrats and a handful of Republicans in Congress.

Despite ...

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